Welcome to Part Three of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive visitors automatically to your site using WordPress.
In Part One of this series, we provided an overview of the process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is publish new content on a regular basis to automatically drive traffic!)
In Part 2, we looked at critical setup decisions. We helped you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your website was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In this section of the series, we will look at the configuration stage of the WordPress traffic automation system. We explain how to configure a WordPress site to get web traffic automatically as you begin to post web content to your site.
WordPress Web Traffic System – Configuration Phase
The ability to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as the greatest challenge they face online. Businesses are becoming increasingly more competitive on a global scale and are looking for any opportunity they can to get better results online.
Having the ability to generate traffic on demand is a huge competitive advantage. An expertly configured website gives your business a flying start from the moment your site is launched.
The Difference Is In The Configuration
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally installed and set up by a website-building expert but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer you.
Here’s a simple way to describe the main difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a professional web presence and online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing system!)
Not only does a whole lot more work go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special type of expert knowledge.
To illustrate this here is a story.
A True Story (Kind Of) …
All is going just fine in the gizmo assembly line when suddenly, things stops.
No one can figure out what’s happened and so the plant manager decides to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Promptly after arriving, the expert immediately walks to the main control box. After staring at the wiring diagrams for less than 5 minutes, the expert then takes out a little hammer and makes a gentle tap near the left edge of the control unit.
Immediately, the machinery returns to normal.
The plant manager is filled with joy as he thanks the expert, who then leaves just as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the factory manager receives a request for payment of services rendered for the sum of $5,000.
Bewildered, the factory manager picks up the phone and dials the expert. Demanding to know why they have been charged so much for so little time spent delivering a minimal amount of work, he then requests an itemized invoice to be sent and hangs up.
The next day, a bill of payment arrives and is placed on the manager’s desk. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive new visitors to their sites.
How much money did the plant stand to lose when production stopped functioning and no one on the business had the expertise to get things up and running again? Did the expert in our story not have every right to demand fair compensation for having invested years building up the knowledge and expertise that enabled him to immediately avert a crisis?
Similarly, if you could have your WP site set up and configured so all you have to do is publish new content and search engines, social followers from sites like Facebook and Twitter and dozens of other web properties would be automatically notified, how much time and money would this save you?
(How much time and money would you save if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your website?)
Although many experts often make complex situations and problems look simple, it rarely is that simple or easy when you try to figure things out.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site involves more than just installing a website and configuring some of the site settings for a client. It requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which plugins need to be installed to get desired functionalities on your site.
- Which third-party services need to be set up and activated to achieve certain outcomes
- Which settings you need to configure in order to ensure that things will work exactly as you have planned, etc.
(Generating new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
Although this stage of the traffic automation system may not seem so technically challenging, it can be quite involved and complicated. It’s not as simple as installing and configuring a solution, clicking on a button or two, or tweaking some settings in your dashboard area … it’s all this and much more.
The configuration phase is a process that involves your server, your WordPress site, and various third-party sites and online services …
(The configuration stage involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If we try to flowchart the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplified diagram showing the steps involved in the configuration process)
Let’s examine what’s involved.
Server Configuration
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your webhosting account for website installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is configuring settings in your server specifically for handling all web traffic …
(During the configuration stage, your web server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is positive traffic. Some of the traffic your site can attract will be unwelcome traffic like spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, is about planning for good and unwanted traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes things like integrating spam protection and threat prevention, to configuring domain and email redirections, setting up 404 error page redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like emails, page error redirects, etc?)
After checking your web server settings and configuring these, the next step is to configure a number of third-party sites.
3rd-Party Services
The purpose of adding external sites is that all content should be published to a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, it will get syndicated automatically to other parts of your web traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
After adding these external services to your traffic system, content linking back to your site is automatically added to these platforms, indexed by search engines and distributed to social media accounts, even to users of the platform itself. Your content and business will benefit from increased exposure online, helping you tap into new sources of traffic.
Some of the sites and services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress settings to help speed up the configuration process and some will need to be done later, during the automation phase.
For example, here are just some of the accounts you will need to have set up before configuring your WordPress site’s settings:
Google Search Console
(Google Search Console)
Google Webmasters lets you tell Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of essential data, tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
Once your Google Webmasters account has been set up, you can use the information with traffic-related settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s performance, SEO, user engagement, marketing efforts, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account has been set up, you can add tracking information to all of your web pages in WordPress via a plugin and feed data instantly to many other useful applications and web properties.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. Once your Bing Webmaster Tools account is set up, the account information can be used with web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part 2, WordPress provides users with the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you are planning to build a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great tools, which can be accessed by various WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate this into your traffic generation system in Part Four of this series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking Accounts
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and get new traffic to your site)
You will need your social media accounts set up before you can integrate these with your traffic generation system.
Once you have set up and configured everything, you will be able to syndicate your content automatically to your social media pages and attract new visitors to your site.
Make sure you have set up profiles with all of the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
There are many social bookmarking sites you can set up. You don’t need to go crazy, just select the ones that will work well with your setup and/or content syndication tools.
(There are loads of social bookmarking sites you can syndicate your content to. Image: ShareThis.com)
Additional Sites, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are a number of new online platforms and content aggregators that can serve as secondary-level sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free plans, and some offer a range of pricing plans to suit different users.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add your WordPress blog feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your website.
There are various solutions you can add to your own web traffic blueprint. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to explore your options and discuss a configuration plan to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with external sites, it’s time to configure WordPress.
WordPress – Configuring Your Website Or Blog For Traffic
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to ensure that your global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some of the important areas.
Global Settings – WordPress
The WordPress dashboard area contains a Settings section that allows you to modify your site’s main settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Fields like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings Screen)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains an important and frequently overlooked traffic notification system …
(Global Settings – Writing Settings Area)
As described in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you have purposely chosen to discourage search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically notify the list of services entered into the Update Services text box
By default, only one service is listed …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature)
WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically …
(Notify dozens of update services automatically!)
Download A Comprehensive List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site!
Click the link below to download a comprehensive list of reliable and authoritative ping services for your WordPress site or blog:
Download A List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site
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Note: If you need help setting up the list of ping services on your site, we recommend using a professional web services provider. You can find professional WordPress service providers in our WordPress Services Directory.
Reading Settings
This section affects how your content gets seen by readers when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings in this section can have an influence traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs a summary of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could play a part in someone’s choice to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your site to view the rest of the content from summaries, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
As far as your traffic system is concerned, however, the most important setting here is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is ticked or not.
Normally, you would want search engines to visit your site. Leaving the box unchecked enables WordPress to ping all the update services you have listed when a new post is published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, make sure this box is left unticked …
(WordPress Settings – Reading Settings)
Discussion Settings
Although this section is mostly concerned with how users engage with content on your site, you have the option to allow notifications to blogs linked to from your articles, and to allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks). This can work for you, but it can also drive bad traffic in the form of SPAM comments …
(Settings Menu – Discussion Settings Section)
Permalink Settings
Permalinks allow your site to publish posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalink Settings)
Here are some of the options for configuring your site’s SEO-friendly URLs …
(Configuring permalink URLs)
If you need help setting up permalinks, go here: Using Permalinks To Improve Your WordPress SEO
WordPress Traffic Plugins
WordPress provides users with plugins that can add almost every type of functionality to your website, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Here are examples of plugin categories and plugins that can help drive more traffic
Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for dealing with the effects of both good traffic and bad traffic. No site is completely immune from being targeted.
(WordPress Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your blog invisible to bot and hacker attacks.
Go here to learn more:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your web content easily indexable …
(SEO plugins help increase traffic by improving your website’s SEO)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your website’s search engine optimization. When properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your web pages easier for search engines like Google and Bing to index, it also lets you specify how to present your content in Google’s search results and social media sites Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing visitors to easily share your content with members of their own online communities can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you provide great content that adds value to readers.
(WordPress users can easily add social features to their site using free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
There are loads of social sharing plugins available for WordPress.
Most social share plugins let you choose which social sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of likes), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to set up protected content sections on your pages which visitors can unlock by sharing your page.
WordPress – Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help you drive more traffic to your site.
For example, in addition to options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your site, many themes also include options for improving SEO and site navigation structure for faster indexing, add tracking code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes can be configured for improved traffic results)
With many WordPress themes, adding social sharing buttons and features to your site is as easy as clicking a button …
(Many WordPress themes provide built-in social sharing features)
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Other Areas To Configure
Last but not least in the web traffic configuration process, are the elements that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include:
Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for a growth in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to handle bad and good traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong when more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you engage in any form of business online (or plan to), you need to ensure that your website stays compliant with all government legal requirements.
(Is Your Website Legally Compliant?)
We have written a detailed article about adding legal pages to WordPress here:
Post Categories & Post Tags
WordPress tags & post categories help improve traffic by improving your site’s search optimization.
(Categories help search engines better organize and index your web pages, which improves traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, it’s best to discuss and set up your site’s post tags and categories during the Website Planning Phase.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that your site’s tags and categories have been correctly set up to deliver optimal benefits.
Add A WordPress Site Map
A site map that lists all of your site’s pages and posts to visitors is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external sites find more of your site’s content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for web traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same things. An HTML site map is a web page that links to all other content on your site, whereas an XML sitemap contains code that only search bots can read. Although Google can index your pages just from an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site can result in increased traffic.
404 Page Not Found – Don’t Forget This!
When visitors searching for your website type in the wrong URL or click on links pointing to pages on your site that no longer exist, they are greeted with a 404 error page …
(A WordPress 404 Not Found error page)
Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 Not Found error page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up in your web server, there are plugins for WordPress that allow you to easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic Automation System: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once your WordPress site has been expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do is publish content on a consistent basis to automatically attract web traffic.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of a number of different components and external web properties …
(WP Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The skills and expertise involved in expertly configuring a WordPress site typically takes some web developers months to learn.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is explained in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Part Three
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of an article series aimed at helping small business owners learn how to grow their business online inexpensively with a WordPress website and proven marketing methods that are easy and quick to implement.
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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